The scarcity of spectrum for mobile broadband networks is a challenge for stakeholders in the mobile landscape, such as users, content providers, and mobile operators (MOs). As users migrate more computing tasks to smartphones and tablets using mobile networks, the scarcity can be expected to worsen. In response to these challenges, the MOs are taking steps to alleviate this scarcity. The MOs may improve network capacity with updates to network infrastructure, such as purchasing more spectrum, increasing spatial reuse by deploying a higher density of cell towers, or deploying femtocells to homes and small businesses. However, such updates incur significant costs.
Given the current capacity crunch, MOs typically address this challenge by limiting network use, including the imposition of bandwidth caps. Bandwidth caps are typically implemented through plans that set a threshold on the amount of data that can be sent over the mobile network without incurring overage charges. When a subscriber consumes data beyond the alloted threshold, the additional data is billed at a higher rate to disincentivize users from consuming large amounts of data.
Other approaches to limit network use include limiting the types of applications that users are allowed to run over the mobile network, using traffic shaping to reduce performance when a subscriber consumes more than the alloted threshold, and disabling OS features such as tethering. Tethering enables a smartphone to provide network access to a laptop computer, thereby increasing the potential for high bandwidth consumption over mobile networks. These approaches reduce the flexibility for mobile users, and limit the number of mobile users that a content provider may otherwise reach.
In some cases, large content providers are even entering the mobile ISP business, and striking deals with existing MOs for revenue sharing and traffic prioritization. However, users are left out of such deals and may lack means to benefit from them because once a user has reached their bandwidth threshold, the user can no longer benefit from the increased access.